On a Tuesday morning in Kyiv’s Obolon district, just hours after Russian ballistic missile strikes rattled Ukraine’s capital overnight, festive balloons drifted across a school playground. Groggy but determined parents and children in celebration attire gathered to the sound of music, marking the traditional kickoff of a new academic year — the fifth such start since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Within seconds, however, the joyful atmosphere shattered: an air raid siren wailed, the crowd scattered, and laughter and melody were replaced by the rumble of distant explosions.
This jarring interruption has become the new normal for Ukrainian education, as the country enters another school year with no end to the ongoing war in sight. Over the course of nearly three years of full-scale conflict, thousands of schools across the nation have been forced to reinvent themselves to survive. Many have shifted to fully remote or hybrid learning models, others hold lessons in bomb shelters, and countless facilities in destroyed or Russian-occupied territories have been shuttered entirely. Russian attacks have already leveled an estimated 1 million educational textbooks, and national officials are bracing for what is projected to be one of the harshest winters of the war, with repeated expectations of widespread power outages and infrastructure disruptions.
As Russia ramps up the intensity of its assault, the cumulative strain of years of conflict weighs heavily on every layer of Ukrainian society. Ukrainian air defense systems still lack sufficient capabilities to intercept the growing barrage of high-speed Russian ballistic missiles, while repeated waves of Shahed attack drones can stretch air raid alerts and attacks across multiple consecutive days. For school administrators like Yevhen Poliakov, principal of Kyiv’s Lyceum Obolon, the choice to hold an in-person opening ceremony was a difficult one. After weighing the risks, he opted to move forward, confident that his school’s on-site bomb shelter would let students reach safety quickly — a bet that paid off when the siren sounded.
Kyiv’s city education administration has outlined a flexible plan for the 2024-2025 academic year: most schools will operate with a mix of in-person and remote instruction, shifting models immediately in response to changing security conditions. Back in August, Ukrainian Education Minister Andrii Butenko released national data showing that of the country’s general secondary schools, 8,424 will run fully in-person, 1,306 fully remote, and 2,211 will use a blended format — meaning nearly one-third of all secondary schools cannot operate at full in-person capacity this year.
Poliakov has long prioritized keeping students in the classroom, pointing to the well-documented downsides of extended remote learning. “Parents need to go to work to earn a living,” he explained. “We can teach their children here, and it is far better for a kid to be under our supervision than locked alone in a ninth-floor apartment with only a dog for company, with no idea what to do with themselves while mom and dad are gone.” To support flexible learning, his lyceum uses Mriia, Ukraine’s national digital education portal and app, to connect students, parents, teachers and administrators for seamless remote instruction when needed. The school is also retrofitting and expanding its shelter, stockpiling firewood and making other preparations for potential winter blackouts.
Across Kyiv, the impact of recent attacks is impossible to ignore. At one school damaged in a Russian strike just days before the start of the term, only a small handful of families showed up for an informal opening ceremony. Three school buildings suffered extensive damage to windows, facades, hallways, doors and classroom equipment, so nearly all students began the year learning online. Still, some families made the trip anyway: Oksana Herasymchuk brought her daughter, who was starting middle school, to mark the occasion. Her daughter began first grade in 2022, just months after the full-scale invasion began, and the entire family has struggled to adapt to the constant uncertainty of wartime life. In the wake of the latest attack, Herasymchuk says she has no clear idea what comes next for her daughter’s education. “Our children’s generation has already had to face so many trials,” she said.
For Yevhen Yurko, bringing his 6-year-old son Darii to the school for his first day was a deliberate act of normalcy. Darii’s first official lesson was held online, but he wanted to see the school building in person. Yurko photographed his son wearing a traditional embroidered vyshyvanka shirt standing in the nearly empty playground. “Even when everything is like this, I still wanted to have something to remember this day by,” Yurko said. He and his wife plan to remain in Kyiv and keep Darii enrolled at the school, convinced that he can get a quality education there even if all lessons end up being held in a basement shelter.
Official data from Kyiv’s education department shows that since the start of the full-scale invasion, 318 education facilities across the city have been damaged by Russian attacks, including 156 primary and secondary schools. Some facilities have been hit multiple times, ranging from two to eight separate strikes. The number of first-graders enrolling in Kyiv schools has plummeted by roughly 40% since 2022, falling from 28,500 on September 1 2022 to just 16,600 this year. Nationwide, the total number of school-aged children in Ukraine has dropped by 17.5% — more than 755,000 students — since the 2021-2022 academic year, before the full-scale invasion began.
Anna Putsova, co-founder of the savED charitable foundation that supports Ukrainian education during the war, summed up the current state of the sector: “Ukrainian education right now feels like a constant obstacle course. The system adapts, but conditions often change faster than you can build one stable model and say ‘now we work like this.’” Putsova emphasized that the long-term toll of the conflict on education extends far beyond damaged buildings: accumulated learning loss, a shrinking student population, and overwhelming burnout among teachers and administrators create overlapping crises that threaten the country’s future. “School is an environment where a child learns to interact with others, build relationships, work in a group, resolve conflicts, be part of a community,” she noted. “For some Ukrainian children, there hasn’t been a normal school experience in several years.”
The impact of the war varies drastically across regions, Putsova explained. Some frontline areas face nonstop air raid alerts that disrupt classes multiple times a day, while other regions have relied almost exclusively on online learning for years, because safe in-person classes can only be held underground. In some host communities, an influx of internally displaced children has outstripped available school capacity, while other areas have lost so many students to displacement or emigration that schools have been forced to merge or close permanently. Among regions where savED operates, more than 92% of schools in Ukrainian-held southern Kherson are damaged or destroyed, alongside 39% in Mykolaiv, more than 67% in eastern Kharkiv, and nearly 54% in northern Sumy.
In the long run, Putsova argued, the crisis in education is not just a problem for the current school year — it threatens Ukraine’s long-term prosperity as an independent nation. “In the long term, this is no longer just a question of school,” she said. “The knowledge level of today’s children will determine the quality of future specialists, the productivity of the economy, the country’s ability to create complex products and technologies.”